In my continuing quest to figure out what to do with myself and how to be a person who just does a variety of things and dazzles people with their charmingly self-effacing and simultaneously self-obsessed personality (current heroes: Julie Klausner, Molls McAleer, Mindy Kaling, anyone who writes for Jezebel or the Hairpin), I keep coming back to blogging.
I've been thinking lately about the difference between practice and performance, and the shift towards the blurring of those two. Before the Internet, there were gatekeepers who kept the chunks of art that the public saw from just being anything. In my mind, I assume those are all dudes in suits with cigars, who talk like Garry Marshall, the kind of guy whose office that family walks into in those Aristocrats jokes. People would practice and practice before they get their stuff in front of the right gatekeepers who would show their stuff to their higher-ups and it would get passed along a chain until some corner office dude was like OK, green light! But now because of the Internet, people can get ahead without those gatekeepers and so they try. And because of the lack of gatekeepers, the quality of stuff that's out there is more varied. On iTunes, you can listen to a podcast that three friends who've never met an agent recorded where they're just shooting the shit, or you can get a Brandenburg concerto or some such other classy thing. Your Twitter feed might include a Kardashian, a Nobel prize winning economist and your mom's best friend. It's all muddled together.
The movement is towards everything being a performance. When I write a Twitter post or a blog entry or even a comment on Facebook, when I put up a podcast or do an improv show, I want everyone to read it and see it and listen to it and judge it, to give it a like or a comment, to up my pageviews. I think that's true of a lot of our generation, whether they're "performers" or not. Our Facebook profiles are a constant lesson in marketing and the performance of self. It's natural to want some sort of validation. But what we are losing is the time along the way to practice, to become a maestro in whatever field we choose. When we ask everyone we know to see everything we do, we won't be able to waste their time when we've finally perfected our craft. Our audience will have disappeared, unwilling to sit through another crappy one-woman show or read your third attempt at a single-serving Tumblr. We will become the boy who cried "Read me!"
We all think it'd be easier to be the next Bo Burnham or Andy Samberg and use the Internet and the eyeballs of our peers than wait for some SUIT to tell us we are finally good enough to perform in front of people. The whole millenial generation wants creative control. We envy the artist who's also an entrepreneur, the self-made man who can run his own podcast like Maron, distribute his own special like Louis CK and avoid having to cater to a network or corporation. But being that I also make my living by being "industry," I want to believe that there is a place somewhere for those people too.
Some part of me still wants to be the artist, and I'm hoping it's not too late and that you can be both without jeopardizing your chances of either. There are people on both sides, who are currently industry or who are currently performers, who've walked that line and been able to do things they love whether they're acting, writing, directing, producing, etc. But right now, in the words of my new improv teacher Becky Drysdale, I'm trying to build too many hamburgers. I have to focus and practice and put in the Malcolm Gladwell hours. I need to merge my millenial ambition with some good old-fashioned patience and diligence.
